A latent class analysis of professional development opportunities for special education teachers in rural school districts: Implications for preventing attrition

Although every state in the United States is experiencing a shortage of special education teachers, projections indicate that rural communities are disproportionally impacted (Levin et al., 2015). Despite professional development being widely identified in the literature as a possible method for improving teacher quality and readiness in rural schools, and thereby preventing teacher attrition, few studies have empirically examined the relationship between special education professional development experiences and attrition in rural schools. This project will test the hypothesis that early-career professional development opportunities for rural special educators are related to job satisfaction and attrition. Data for this study came from the 2017-2018 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS). Extraction of data from the NTPS data set isolated early career special education teachers working in rural communities. A latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify a teacher typology concerning early career professional development, resulting in a two-class model, 'Greater Access to Professional Development' (Latent Class 1) and 'Less Access to Professional Development' (Latent Class 2). These two classes had similar access to a variety of professional development opportunities; however, those in the Greater Access to Professional Development class had greater access overall. Additional analyses examined whether LCA groups differed on measures of job satisfaction and attrition and found that teachers with greater access to professional development experiences report higher levels of job satisfaction than teachers with less access to professional development opportunities. Implications for these findings are described in detail.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Albright, Jordan

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Scarpa-Friedman, Angela

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Williams, Thomas O.
• Ollendick, Thomas H.
• Breaux, Rosanna

• special education
• rurality
• professional development
• job satisfaction
• attrition

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:34992

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110866